African Re-greening Initiatives

Tuesday, 4 November 2014

This is not a natural forest, but a dense and
diverse agroforestry system in Southern Ethiopia close to the town of Dilla. Population densities are said to be as high as 1400 people/km².

This update
is mainly about forest restoration and agroforestry in Ethiopia and about the
activities of the W4RA, Web Alliance for Re-greening in the Sahel

Let’s start this update with some good news

On September 23 the UN Climate Summit was held
in New York. During this Summit, an alliance of governments, companies and
civil society issued the New York
Declaration on Forests. This declaration contains a pledge to restore 350 million hectares of deforested and degraded
landscapes by 2030.

This represents
an enormous commitment by political leaders, which indicates that restoring
degraded forests is getting higher on the international policy agenda, which is
positive.

However, it
is unlikely that by 2030 such a vast area of land can be restored if stakeholders
rely on conventional approaches , which is planting trees. This target may well be achieved, however if
all stakeholders are mobilized in a movement that shifts the accent to the protection and
management of trees and bushes, which regenerate spontaneously on-farm
(agroforestry systems) as well as off-farm (restoration of degraded
forests). While there may be a need for reforestation
in some instances, externally funded and government managed tree planting schemes
are too costly to be used to restore 350 million hectares. In addition to the
costs of establishing nurseries, producing and transporting tree seedlings, preparing
sites and organizing labor for planting, it can be very costly to protect and
ensure the survival of young seedlings. The cost of planting trees and
establishing tree plantations usually exceeds 1000 $/ha and it can be as high
as 6000 $/ha. Despite the high costs,
this approach to restoration through reforestation in
semi-arid and sub-humid regions often has high mortality rates (80 percent or
more).

The
Economist of 23 August had an interesting short article about the Great Green
Wall in China. It mentions that in Ningxia, in northwest China, a pest wiped
out 1 billion poplar trees in 2000, which represented two decades of tree
planting efforts.

As often
mentioned in previous re-greening updates, farmers across the Sahel have shown
the way forward by successfully protecting and managing on-farm trees and in
some regions they have done so at scale. The most striking example is found in
Niger where farmers have created new agroforestry systems on 5 million
hectares. This has been done by farmers. The external investment costs have
been low. The external funding for promoting re-greening by farmers in Niger has
not exceeded 100 million US $, which means that average external investment costs
per hectare were 20 US $ or less.

Survival
rates of trees regenerating naturally tend to be high, because the trees are
protected by farmers and their communities. They do so because they perceive
ownership of the trees and have been empowered to manage the trees and other
natural resources through the effective devolution of resource rights to the
local level. And we are gradually
becoming more aware of the benefits, which can be very substantial.

Good news from Brazil

World
Resources Institute (WRI Brazil), the International Union for the Conservation
of Nature (IUCN) and several other partners are jointly organizing a workshop
on low cost restoration methods. This workshop will be held in Rio de Janeiro
from 19 – 21 November. Brazil has been
very successful in slowing down the rate of deforestation, but until now it has
been less successful in restoring degraded land at scale. One of the impacts of
this workshop may be that the protection and management of natural regeneration
will get more prominently on the radar of national policymakers and restoration
stakeholders. The re-greening experience in the Sahel and in Ethiopia will be
presented at this workshop. It is especially important to move ahead quickly
with low cost restoration in the Brazilian Amazon, as the deforestation is now perceived
to be contributing to significant water shortages in major urban areas like São
Paolo in Brazil. More info...

Agroforestry and forest restoration in Ethiopia

In July I
had an opportunity to make a field visit in Ethiopia and decided to visit the
famous Humbo forest as well as the agroforestry systems in Southern Ethiopia
close to the town of Dilla.

The picture
below is taken in Humbo in July 2014 (Plate 2).The mountain is completely covered by trees and bushes, but when the
project began in 2007, an area of 2700 ha was almost bare. The process of
natural regeneration has occurred at stunning speed. The link below provides
more information about the Farmer-Managed Natural Regeneration activities of
World Vision Australia in different parts of the world. It provides background
information as well as more pictures about the Humbo project in Ethiopia, which
is a joint project of World Vision Ethiopia, the Federal republic of Ethiopia
and the Biocarbon fund of the World Bank. Using the link you can also find more
information about the nearby Soddo project. Plate 3 shows a picture of the
mountain top at Soddo, which is covered by trees.

Plate 2 A mountain top in Humbois completely covered by trees

Plate 3. The mountain top at Soddo was bare

and
is now covered with trees,

which protect agricultural land downslope

Plate 4. Dense and complex agroforestry systems
between

Dilla and Bule

Agroforestry between Dilla and Bule

The town of
Awassa is about 270 km South of the capital Addis Ababa. It’s another 90 km
southwards from Awassa to the small town of Dilla. Almost all the land between
Awassa and Dilla is covered by agroforestry systems as far as the eye can see.
From Dilla it’s possible to take a narrow winding road up the mountain to Bule,
which is situated at an altitude of about 2800 m.Plate 4 shows agroforestry systems between
Dilla and Bule. It is hard to imagine
that this is not a natural forest, but an agroforestry system.

This area
is referred to as Gedeo and it is famous for its complex agroforestry systems
with false banana (enset) and coffee as two important species. At higher
altitudes bamboo becomes more important (plate 5).The Gedeo agroforestry landscape may become a
World Heritage site. Population densities in the Gedeo are said to be up to 1400
people/km². Where densities are highest, maize and other annual crops disappear
and only perennials are cultivated. I had the privilege to visit the Gedeo landscape
in the company of Dr. Getachew Mulugeta, an agroforestry specialist of the Southern
Agricultural Research institute (SARI), who has detailed knowledge of this area
and shares it with infectious enthusiasm .

At the invitation of Réseau MARP (Burkina
Faso), Sahel Eco (Mali), and CARE Niger, the Web Alliance for Re-greening in
Africa (W4RA) team from VU University Amsterdam, did a new round of creative Agile workshops in Burkina Faso and Mali.
The objective of these workshops is to co-create innovative communication
systems to improve agro-forestry value chains to increase the incomes of local
farmers and improve well-being of local communities.

These
activities are part of a project funded by the Netherlands development
cooperation (DGIS) and implemented by the World Agroforestry Center “Program
for Food and Water in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa”, The workshops took
place from 19 July to 1 August2014.

The Agile “Workshop-based” approach uses a collaborative,
iterative and adaptive methodology to co-create ICT systems, which are tailored
to a specific rural context by a mixed team of local development specialists,
radio journalists, rural producers and a team of ICT specialists.

In
Ouahigouya, Burkina Faso, a two-day session was organized with five local radio
stations. The radio journalists helped to compose, translate and record spoken
text in local Moré language. These voice fragments are used for the development
of voice-based market information systems, which allow farmers to broadcast
their product offerings on the local radio. The name of this new information
system will be “Raas Kibaya”, which means “market information” in Moré. The
name and the functionality of the system was a result of the co-creation
sessions. After the
workshops the W4RA team met two farmers-innovators in their fields: Ousseini
Zoromé and Ousseini Kindo. Both farmers are experienced agroforesters who help
to develop the system specifications.

Plate 7 Visit to the fields of Ousséni Kindo.
From left to right:

Ousséni Kindo, Julien Ouedraogo (Réseau MARP), Wendelien
Tuyp,

Anna Bon, Hans Akkermans (VUA), Francis Dittoh

(University of Development
Studies, Ghana)

In Mali,
another W4RA workshop was held in Ségou jointly with Sahel Eco and other Malian
partners from the DGIS project. All participants discussed information needs,
and decided jointly that a voice-based market information system was their
highest priority at this moment. Their choice was influenced by the experiences
of Sahel Eco and W4RA with the Radio Marché market information system, designed
and built for farmers in the Tominian area. This system has helped increase the
sales of honey and shea butter for a group of farmers in 19 villages around
Tominian. Amadou Tangara, value-chain expert from Sahel Eco presented a plan
for development of value chains in rural areas. He explained the different
stages and approach, and pointed to the importance of adaptive ICT systems such
as Radio Marché in the process of developing value chains.

Logo of the system for voice-based

market information

The experience with
Radio Marché, which was built, tested and implemented in Mali since 2011 can and will be used to build
similar systems, adapted to the localconditions (language, market situation, products, etc) in other
countries.

EverGreen Agriculture Partnership which is an
alliance of organizations and governments, united by a common goal of
agricultural landscapes with trees integrated into cropping and grazing land as
a method of increasing productivity and resilience, environmental
sustainability and food security.